"This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place. The 2D specifications will be released very soon and the 3D ones will follow shortly."

They have been making these sort of statements for years. Why is this any different? Why could they not release the specs at the X Summit? It would have been great PR and eliminated some of the scepticism.

The OSS train has already left the station and ATI is still buying the ticket. Even if they do release the specs, Intel and NVidia are still years ahead of them in development and distribution.